ID cards downgraded

We should celebrate but unfortunately the government has already wasted our money on investigating whether a national ID card would be viable and there’s nothing left in our pockets to contribute to the party. The national ID card scheme has been downgraded from potentially compulsory to voluntary. Still it was a tidy earner for the goverment and a few high tech industries closely associated with the project. For example over the past 5 years the government had spent £20m on one segment of the project, the Critical Workers Identity Card and of course it is behind schedule and being badly run. As with anything IT related that the government’s hands fall upon.

But (and there’s always a but when a government announcement is made) the voluntary roll out is to be speeded up and the over-75s will become the guinea pig group that is handed the cards for free. They will hold them alongside the thousands of foreign nationals in the UK who will still be forced to carry one. The government will get you sooner rather than later.

The whole ID card fiasco has been one that has mirrored the government’s pathological ineptitude towards governance and dealing with security. They have failed to grasp that their primary role is to protect our liberty and impinge upon our daily lives as little as possible. ID cards are a statement about how they have failed to address the threat of terrorism and how it is far easier to assume we are all terrorists. More in the hope that eventually by dragging us all up in one net they will still be able to find those they are looking for via careful sifting.

Still, by the time the current government believes that this programme can be rolled out they will hopefully have been handed a sound thrashing. But of course, the hope is that the other politicians aren’t actually lying…